The Food

What with all the bad ministering, writing a paper and doing other homework, I just didn’t have time to tell you about the yummy food we had over the weekend.

It all started on Friday. I took a half day and got the better-half to meet me for Chinese for lunch. That task isn’t really that hard since they know him by name and favorite order there. The best part was getting him to agree to go to the grocery store with me. We decided to have brats for dinner and they were fabulous.

We let them gently simmer in a pot of beer and onions and then the better-half grilled them. Friday night I caramelized some onions and green peppers to go with the brats. We used a multi-grain baguette to hold all the meat and vegetable goodness. I have no idea what else we ate because the brats were so awesome.

Saturday we made a trip to a top-notch seafood store and got a dozen oysters from Nova Scotia and a dozen oysters from local waters. After we got in the car, the better-half decided that yes, he really did want to also have Chilean sea bass. He went back in and got a big fillet of fish.

I have to admit that we don’t have a whole lot of experience shucking oysters because we only shuck a few times a year and only in recent years. Maybe we’ve shucked oysters 6 or 7 times? I was a shucking machine. I joked to the better-half (who jabbed himself with the oyster–not the oyster knife) that I was staring the oysters down until they had to tell me exactly where to put my blade. My tool of choice? The 6-in-1 tool found at any hardware store. We each ate a Nova Scotia oyster raw and it was like taking a sip of the sea. Briny but tasty. We steamed all of the remaining oysters.

On the sea bass, the better-half slathered olive oil and salt and pepper and then grilled it. He also made an awesome sauce of capers, pepper oil and onions. Dinner was great except we need to start employing the warmed plate concept when cooking fish, especially in the winter. Everything got a little cool before we finished eating.

Yesterday I made a beer, onions and beef dish that’s really too thick to call a stew because it simmered so long there was hardly any juice. Some, but not very stew-like. We had some smoky bacon from Loveless Cafe and that added such flavor to the dish. We used a porter from a local brewery and that also brought a smoky deliciousness to the dish.

I sauteed some beet greens with shallots and roasted the beets and then tossed them with a Dijon mustard vinaigrette. Those roasted beets were amazing. I forgot all about the ability of beets to make it look like you just pissed blood until after I had a minor freak out this morning. I’ve pissed blood before and it isn’t a trip down memory lane I wanted to take. Well, that last sentence makes you want to hear more about how lovely our feasting was this weekend, I’m sure.